This X-ray shows the fossil thread-like red algae from 1.6 billion years ago

Scientists from the Swedish Museum of Natural History found two kinds of fossils resembling red algae in sedimentary rocks at Chitrakoot in central India.

One type is thread-like, the other one consists of fleshy colonies.

The scientists, whose findings were published in the journal PLOS Biology, were able to see distinct inner cell structures and so-called cell fountains, the bundles of packed and splaying filaments that form the body of the fleshy forms and are characteristic of red algae.

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Professor Stefan Bengtson, of the Swedish Museum of Natural History, said that it was difficult to be 100 percent certain of the type of plant which is contained, "but the characters agree quite well with the morphology and structure of red algae".
The earliest traces of life on Earth are at least 3.5 billion years old.

But the single-celled organisms present at that time lacked nuclei and other organelles.

Prof Bengtson said large multicellular eukaryotic organisms became common much later, about 600 million years ago, near the transition to the Phanerozoic Era, the "time of visible life".

He said discoveries of early multicellular eukaryotes have been sporadic and difficult to interpret, challenging scientists trying to reconstruct and date the tree of life.

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Prof Bengtson said the Indian fossils, 400 million years older and by far the oldest plant-like fossils ever found, suggest that the early branches of the tree of life need to be recalibrated.
He said: "The 'time of visible life' seems to have begun much earlier than we thought."

The presumed red algae lie embedded in fossil mats of cyanobacteria, called stromatolites, in 1.6 billion-year-old Indian phosphorite.
The thread-like forms were discovered first, and when the then doctoral student Therese Sallstedt investigated the stromatolites she found the more complex, fleshy structures.

She said: "I got so excited I had to walk three times around the building before I went to my supervisor to tell him what I had seen."

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